Comment by matheusmoreira

Comment by matheusmoreira 10 months ago

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> keeping pro-lula Twitter accounts up while censoring conservative ones

Funny. Among the accounts targeted by this judge, not a single one is pro-Lula. Really curious, indeed. Are these guys saints? Are they literally never wrong on the internet?

Not too long ago, one of Lula's ministers "disseminated" some serious "misinformation". She literally said about a hundred million brazilians are starving to death right now. Where's the judge's fact checking? I wonder.

I mean, Lula himself has admitted to journalists that he just makes up statistics on the spot. You'd think he'd be this judge's worst enemy, given how gung-ho he is about "misinformation"... Oh shit, is that the judge attending a barbecue with Lula and his allies? Whew, lad. What do you know?

littlestymaar 10 months ago

You're conflating two different things:

- broad Twitter ban (which is the topic of TFA), which itself results from Twitter refusal to cooperate with Brazilian justice.

- prosecutions related to the attempted coup in Brasilia, which includes activities on Twitter (and obviously there isn't a single pro-lula in the list of people involved, like there's no Bidden supporters among the people charged for Jan 6th, and it's not a conspiracy against republicans …).

Big corporations aren't exempted from laws and they cannot unilaterally decide not to comply with Court's order, whatever you think about the order in the first place. And the reason why Musk doesn't comply with Brazilian justice isn't free speech, as he's eager to comply with authoritarian regimes all around the world, he's just doing that for political motives.

Reminder: you'll get censored on Twitter if you type the word “cisgender" and Musk supported Ron De Santis censoring books in libraries, and also canceled Tesla orders from people after they criticized him personally: Musk doesn't give a shit about freedom of speech, he just claim he does hopping enough idiots will buy it against all evidence.

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  • matheusmoreira 10 months ago

    I'm not "conflating" anything. The "fake news" nonsense has been on-going since 2019. The persecution of the brazilian right has been on-going since the lead up to the 2022 elections at the very least, possibly earlier. The events that led to the order to ban X began in 2019 and accelerated in 2022. He's been ordering the banishment of political accounts since before the election. I know because I was commenting on the situation here on HN the whole time.

    None of these things should have happened in the first place. Twitter should never have been banned because the judge should never have ordered the censorship of those accounts to begin with. There should have been no order for him to defy in the first place.

    You may legally object to what Musk did based on the judge's authority. The point is I have zero moral objections to it. Illegal orders must not be obeyed. "Just following orders" has not been a valid excuse for anything since nazis were hanged at Nuremberg. And I do believe this judge's orders are illegal. He just gets away with it because there's nobody above him to put a stop to it.

    I don't particularly care about Twitter or how hypocritical Musk is. No doubt he has plenty of self-serving reasons for defying the judge. The fact that a judge ordered him to censor political accounts over "misinformation" nonsense is what matters here. Musk can do whatever he wants on his platform, I don't care. Judges ordering censorship of politicians? I absolutely do care. Censorship is when the government shows up and deletes what you said. And censorship equals dictatorship, it's that simple. It's undeniable evidence that brazilians are living under a dictatorship.

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    • littlestymaar 10 months ago

      What you're writing is incredible honestly.

      You say Brasil is a dictatorship, yet we're talking about a country where the current president is a left wing guy coming back to power after his party being beaten by the right wing previous president and been jailed himself for corruption charges which eventually got dismissed.

      It's the kind of thing that doesn't exist in dictatorship. In a dictatorship

      - there's no such thing as a former president doing a comeback

      - no former president goes to jail when his party is in power, or that's because he got betrayed by his own party

      - there's no political switch between parties with such a dramatic different world views

      > Censorship is when the government shows up and deletes what you said. And censorship equals dictatorship

      Your definition of censorship is delusional: freedom of speech, like any freedom, can never be absolute, and it's always and everywhere regulated by laws.

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      • matheusmoreira 10 months ago

        ... The former president made a "comeback" ? Yeah... Because of these judges.

        They erased his crimes. They released him from prison. They persecuted anyone who called him corrupt. Hell they even gave back the corruption money. They allowed him to run for president. They did everything in their power to make sure he won. Then they banned from politics the only guy who ever managed to pry the worker's party from power.

        Then they went to public events to openly brag about it. Supposedly impartial judge goes out and literally says "we have defeated bolsonarism", other judges put out statements literally spelling it out for you that "Lula is president today due to the decisions of the supreme court". Then they start persecuting Bolsonaro and his supporters. Leading us to this very moment where Twitter gets blocked nation wide for failure to comply with their censorship orders.

        I actually wish I was delusional. I wish I was just hallucinating all this nonsense. Then I could just take some antipsychotics and everything would be fixed. Unfortunately it's not that easy.

        > Your definition of censorship is delusional

        It's not my definition.

        Read the very simple words written on the constitution.

        > Any and all censorship of political and artistic nature is prohibited

        The accounts here were engaged in political speech.

        Blocking their accounts for that speech absolutely does match the "any and all censorship of political nature" clause.

        Nowhere does it say that the judge gets to censor them if they engage in "fake news" or whatever.

        Therefore what the judge did is unconstitutional.

        Before the elections I witnessed them censor a political documentary before it was even published. Without ever watching the thing, they decided it was "fake news" and stopped its publication. A priori censorship, something not seen in these lands since last century's military dictatorship. An obviously biased political documentary that nobody cares about and only a fool would believe to begin with... Their censorship of it was what made me realize the truth.

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